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Company

Revitalize industrial traditions with contemporary designs.

A Finnish-Korean firm called Company travels to places with a rich industrial heritage—Belgium, Germany, Korea, Russia, Finland—and works with the local craftspeople to create new products in a contemporary way while demonstrating the skills of the industrial traditions.

Company designs these incredibly charming products. One is called “Car Shoes,” made in Busan, Korea. The shoes look like race cars: one shoe has race car driver Michael Schumacher and the other has driver Kimi Raikkonen. As you walk, it looks like they are racing each other.

Another is called the “Winter Tie,” which was created with an old Finnish manufacturer. It’s essentially a hybrid between a scarf and a tie.

There’s a very nice pair of felt shoes called “Dance Shoes,” also from Finland. They are made for a father. On top of his shoe, there’s a much smaller shoe made for his daughter, a place for her when they are dancing together.

In Korea they collaborated with craftspeople to create “Noodle Shoes,” which is a pair of sneakers that have laces like noodles sitting on top, a curly ornament. They are selling quite well. The Bibimbag, named after the famous spicy Korean dish, “keeps all your ingredients separate.”

There’s a very nice bag from Bavaria, a region famous for sausages and leather products. They went into a leather factory and collaborated with the factory workers to create the incredibly feminine and elegant “Metal Bag,” which is made out of the chain mail used in butcher’s gloves.

Rather than applying a universal approach everywhere, these products are about taking the time and care to discover local conditions. They look at each situation, culture, and climate in a specific way and try to evolve or invent an approach that gets the maximum amount of impact out of available resources. It’s about creating designs really tailored to local cultures.

Bjarke Ingels is the founding partner of the architecture and urban design firm, BIG.